Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Craig's Tryst

Jay Reding, once again, parrots Hugh Hewwit:

Undoubtedly had Craig been a Democrat, this story would be largely over, those criticizing the Senator would be labeled homophobes, and Craig would be already planning his memoirs — see disgraced New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey or Barney Frank — both of whom put their trysting partners on the government payroll.


Except that gay Democrats, being largely well-adjusted individuals at peace with their homosexuality, rarely have a need to troll men's rooms for sex.

The reason that such behavior is indemic to Republicans is because the cognitive dissonance of being gay, yet hating yourself and everyone who you would want to have sex with, drives one to seek these anonymous trysts in bathrooms. Honestly I think that's much worse than putting one's mister or mistress on the payroll, which people have been doing since they invented secretaries.

Anyway it's not exactly clear why tapping one's foot in a bathroom is a fundamentally worse infraction than David Vitter actually breaking the law by paying for sex with prostitutes. Obviously, the more of your guys who step down this way, the better for America; nonetheless, it's obvious that there's a homophobic double standard at work here among conservatives. Vitter received a standing ovation for his behavior; but of course the long knives come out for Craig.

Jim McGreevy resigned, incidentally, and Golan Cipel actually did work for his campaign and in his office; there's also some confusion as to whether or not the relationship was consensual or not. I'm not sure he's a very good example of a double standard that Democrats find beneficial.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Lawyers don't know Science

Jay Reding is is retarded:

Global warming studies should be conducted under rigorous scientific conditions using the same double-blind methods commonly used to eliminate bias in drug tests.


...WTF? Double-blind methods are only used in drug studies because drug studies are the only studies where you have to worry about placebo effect, which is the only thing double-blinding eliminates.

In a sense, climate measurement is already double-blind - the Earth is blind, and the thermometers are blind. Double-blinding is appropriate where the focus of study is a population of human individuals, because people in drug studies have to subjectively rate their experiences and the degree to which they're feeling better. And people will claim to be feeling better if they perceive they're expected to feel better.

But the Earth won't warm just because you expect it to. The problem here is that Jay doesn't understand what double-blinding actually means, or how it would be relevant to climatology - and he doesn't care to, of course. He doesn't suggest it in good faith. It's a cypher, a shibboleth, an impossible bar that climatology by definition can never meet, all to prevent Jay from having to deal with the inconvenient reality of anthropogenic climate change.